“Get out of here, mate. They’re planning to work you over.”
“They’re just looking for free beer. I’ll buy one round and go to bed.”
“They’re looking for more than beer. They’re talking about you in Vietnamese.”
I had been searching for a tourist bar in Danang half an hour earlier when I was yanked to a sidewalk table where two young men were drinking rice wine from a champagne bottle. The two quickly became six, all barraging me with exuberantly nonsensical English. “You go Vietnam, OK? Vietnam America, OK? World cup football, OK? Valentine, OK?” They groped me constantly, feeling my wrists, touching me below the chin just in front of my throat. This gesture, they said, meant “friends forever,” but the raucous laughter said it meant something else.
The crowd was more than I could handle, especially when they kept pouring me one shot for every shot the six of them drank. When I got up to leave, I had to physically wrench myself from their grasp. Two of them broke away from the group and threw their arms around me as I headed down the sidewalk. I hoped desperately to find some other tourists.
The Brit was the only other Westerner in the bar, an expat working on the tunnel being constructed under the Hai Van pass. He offered to lend me his motorbike driver for a quick escape to my hotel. He knew I was cycling across Vietnam, and plainly thought I was crazy. “Couldn’t afford a plane ticket?”
The motorbike driver took an unfamiliar route and dropped me off at a brothel. “Good bar,” he said, pointing upstairs. “Lots of ladies.”
“My hotel,” I said. “Take me to my hotel.”
Lying in bed, I realized I hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in English in at least four days. I watched a golf match in ESPN just to hear the American announcers. I remembered why I hate golf.
I’m looking forward to Hoi An.
